Confused by a customer support message

I got a message that they had rejected one of the items in my latest order because of lose shells - specifically it said "After taking a closer look, we cannot print one of the models in order....."

Next day ( yesterday) I got a message which I thought was just saying I needed to reorder the item.

So I revise the item and re-submit and new order with it and several other things last night.

However, this morning I get a reminder about the message I received yesterday. So I go back and re-read it as I could not understand why .

It actually says

"We have rejected the model based on loose shells.
We did printed the model but we came to the conclusion that the model is not correct (loose shells).

If you are interested we can create a new order for you with the model: xxxx and send you the models."


So does that mean it was printed, but possibly incorrectly ? so it has been printed ?

I replied to customer services this asking them to clarify this but have not heard back from them yet. I'm a little bit worried as things in the new order are starting to go into production and I'm not sure if I will still be able to cancel it if the previous order is OK enough to use. It seams a waste to reprint if we don't have too.

Tom

Loose shell, could that mean there's a mesh/part not connected or intersected with the main model and could be lost after printing? Maybe it's a very small part, like a bolt, bar, or other detail that looks like it's touching the model, but no enough.


I found an old thread with a similar question about loose shell rejections:
https://www.shapeways.com/forum/pdf.php?th=5353

Strange. When one of my models suffered post-production breakage, I would get a non-prefabricated email from service with one or more pictures. Not sure if something went wrong in your case or if this is supposed to be one of the process improvements - did the message you got contain any photos of the printed part ?

No, both the automated(?) email saying they could not print and the first from customer services only contained the normal Netfabb renderings showing what was wrong, so I was assuming they had not got as far as printing it.

However the guy from customer support has got back to me this afternoon and explained that it had indeed been printed. He is going to send some pics tomorrow and cancel the new one I have submitted - I am presuming they have the ability to do that even though other parts of the order are already in production.

As to the error - yes it was there - in fact I for some unknown reason, deliberately spaced 2 parts 0.05 mm apart in assembly. The strange part is this is a direct copy of another file that I put in to this one to bring the density above 10% and when I go back and check the original version of the copied file it's fine and has the distance set to 0. Don't know what gremlins I've got running round in my machine !

Tom